1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to character recognition and more particularly to the recognition of character images formed in a memory in which the unknown character is first categorized into a category wherein it and one or more possible characters fit, with a final comparison made between each of the possible characters and the known character of the category.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Prior art systems, by and large, have involved "brute force" type of hardware solutions for the recognition of characters. For example one character at a time may be read and deciphered through a programmed logic array (PLA). The PLA scheme is presently used by manufacturers of optical character recognition devices.
The PLA approach is very fast, as required for reading and recognizing magnetic ink characters on checks, but is quite expensive.
Reading bar codes for grocery store check out operations is quite fast, but is also quite expensive.
In this preferred embodiment, an entire National Retail Merchants Association price tag, consisting of approximately 40 characters, must be read within one second. The expensive "brute force" systems mentioned above would be far too expensive and the microprocessor-microcontroller system of this invention provides adequate speed at low cost.